Rating: 1.5 / 5 stars

“Pacific Rim: Uprising” is the sequel to 2013’s “Pacific Rim,” which was directed by Guillermo Del Toro (“The Shape of Water”). This time around, Steven S. DeKnight (“Daredevil”) takes the director’s chair for this sequel that takes place 10 years after the original and sees a new world in the wake of the Kaiju-Jaeger war. Jaegers regularly patrol the streets, and a new breed of criminal, the Jaeger scrap junkers, have emerged. They are people who exist solely to collect parts of old Jaegers and either sell them or cobble them together to make Jaegers their own. One of these criminals is Jake Pentecost (John Boyega, “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”), son of the deceased war hero from the original, Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba, “Thor: Ragnarok”), who has attempted to turn away from his previous life as a Jaeger pilot. But after one to many arrests, Jake and fellow pint-sized criminal Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny) are brought in and forced to join the new Jaeger program as a new enemy emerges that threatens the world once again.

This film was interesting because expectations were pretty low going in, and the final result is not something that was at all out of the realm of possibility. This is another sequel to the level of the Kingsman sequel, but while it seemed much more disappointing because of how fantastic the first one was, this film does not feel nearly as bad simply because there really was not much going for it in the first place.

Besides the obvious signs, such as the extended period of time since the first one, the director changeup and the cast shift, there was just this overall feeling in the air concerning this film that it was not going to be good. While that certainly did hold up, there were still things to enjoy here. Boyega, ever since his breakout role in “The Force Awakens,” has proven himself to be one of the most charming and charismatic actors to grace the silver screen, and there is an argument to be made here that he is a much more solid lead than Charlie Hunnam (“The Lost City of Z”) in the first one. In addition, the effects are a little bit more polished and also more in the daytime, allowing for an increase in visibility for the fight scenes. The fight scenes are the star of the movie, as when boiled down to brass tacks, these are movies about giant robots fighting giant monsters.

The rest of the movie is mediocre trash that seems to take up the entire checklist of things to be found in every generic, studio-mandated blockbuster sequel. It is a basic repeat of the first movie, almost down to complete sequences and storytelling methods that seem to be right on recycle mode. For a movie marketed as a giant robots vs. giant monsters movie, the actual amount of fighting in the movie is somehow less than it was in the first one.

Acting-wise, outside of Boyega is as generic as generic could be. Scott Eastwood (“The Fate of the Furious”) is his partner in this, and once again, he is perfectly generic, as he has been in all things. The rest of the cast is so forgettable that they are not even worth mentioning, at least when it comes to the new additions. For the returning faces (yes, the studio managed to actually convince some people from the first movie to return) Rinko Kikuchi (“Terra Formars”) and Burn Gorman (“Imperium”) are basically doing the exact same thing they did in the first movie. Then there’s Charlie Day (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”), who, without spoiling anything about what his character does in this movie, has a twist around him that is just so sad, considering how likeable and goofy he was in the first movie.

The thing that really sold that first movie was Del Toro, who managed to inject a dumb giant monster movie with so much more heart, fun, goofiness, visual flair and creativity than a movie like “Pacific Rim” deserved, and it’s very obvious that this one could barely live up.

Image from Legendary via YouTube.com